Just found this site: No Fear Shakespeare
According to their website, “No Fear Shakespeare puts Shakespeare’s language side-by-side with a facing-page translation into modern English—the kind of English people actually speak today.”
Continue reading “No Fear Shakespeare?”
Just came across this great article
The Shakespearean Heroes Science Fiction Should Steal From
If you are at all interested in popular culture, this is a cool little (ok, not so little) article. io9 is a science fiction website/blog/news site/discussion forum… what a great discovery… it just might become regular reading for me.
Around the beginning of this year 2009, long before I got this wild hair that has become the BSP, I was in Target, shopping with my family. I was in the magazine section and picked up Rolling Stone. [I used to be a subscriber in younger days… now (old man alert) I often don’t know who is on the cover… (Lady Gaga? really?). I try to discover new bands, and late last year, I happened upon The Gaslight Anthem, a GREAT band out of New Jersey, the home of my favorite rocker/writer, Springsteen.]
Anyway, as I flipped through the new album reviews, this caught my eye:
Continue reading “Titus Andronicus Rocks!”
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
This week’s podcast includes the discussions of and film review for the upcoming Nora Ephron movie, Julie and Julia.
Continue reading “Podcast Episode 06: Julie vs. Julia”
OK, so our first month ends today. The Comedy of Errors is over. I think we’ve made a pretty good start… I had hoped for a little more interaction from the community, but hey, that’s ok… it’s a pretty demented mission I’ve set for myself, and I don’t expect many — any? — of you to follow.
As the month was ending, though, I began thinking hard about this blog. I’ve tried to stay as objective as possible in the composition of the daily entries (for those who know me well, you know how hard this is for me, a pretty SUBjective, heart-on-sleeve, passionate guy [read, at times pedantic and blowhard-y… yeah, not a word, I KNOW]). And in the past few days, I’ve began to wonder if (since there doesn’t seem too many readers out there to offend) maybe I shouldn’t just, you know, loosen up, let loose, and let the ever-lovin’ bullsh!t flow.
Continue reading “Comedy of Errors… a look back…”
Yesterday, we talked a little about beginnings, specifically of the plays themselves, about how they could be either strong and loud (to grab the audience’s attention) or slow (building exposition at a more leisurely pace).
Today, let’s take a microcosmic look at this concept: what about the beginnings of scenes themselves.
Continue reading “Beginnings, Part Two (individual scenes)”
So how does the/this/a play begin?
Why is it important?
Well, riddle me this, Batman: what does the modern theater have that the Shakespearean Globe did not? I’m not talking plush seats. Or cocktails in the lobby. Or validated parking.
I’m talking about house lights.
Huh?
Continue reading “Beginnings, Part One (the play as a whole)”
OK, don’t know how many of you have heard of Seth Grahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies or his projected follow-up, Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, but now’s there’s another classic v. monster mash-up on the horizon:
Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters
So it’s got me to thinking:
What about a Shakespearean monster mash-up?
Which play? What monster?
My wife Lisa’s vote is for vampires (she’s devoured the Twilight novels [though with less and less enthusiasm] as well was the Sookie Stackhouse novels by Charlaine Harris (the source for HBO’s True Blood) and the Anita Blake, Vampire Hunter books by Laurell K. Hamilton), with maybe Friar Laurence being a blood sucker himself (the potion he gives Juliet is just to incapacitate her before he turns her… and when he finds Romeo in the chamber, he is touched by their romanticism and turns them both)… it might just work.
In “all my spare time,” I might even play around with the idea… any others out there?
Shakespearean use of rhyme within verse serves a number of different purposes:
Continue reading “Why Rhyme? Part II: The Answers”
OK, before we continue digging, a question:
Why, in a play that is mostly poetry (by my count, poetic lines make up over 86% of the total lines of the play), and mostly blank verse, UNrhymed iambic pentameter (and, again, by my count, over 75% of the poetic lines of the play are unrhymed)…
Why, then, does Shakespeare use 350+ lines of rhyming poetry in The Comedy of Errors?
more or less… I’m compulsive, but I’m not that anal…
No answers from Bill today… just leaving it all up to you in the blogosphere…
Respond, discuss, knock yourselves out… we’ll talk more about it at some future date…
